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It’s Midsummer night, 1874, and Corpus Playrooms are every inch Strindberg’s subterranean world of social dissatisfaction, sexual frustration and volatile human power dynamics. From freshly cooked kidney, to wax-sealed bottles of Burgundy to real tears, this is a production thoroughly committed to the naturalism of its writing. Holly Gupta’s set showcases exceptional attention to detail, offering a vividly three-dimensional canvas, onto which three stylish performances are cast, and with which they interact with tangible credibility.

Celine Lowenthal’s direction deftly exploits the physical potential of both the space and the actors within it to express with sensitivity the atmospheric sense of imprisonment which is the keynote of this play. George Johnston and Genevieve Gaunt’s Jean and Miss Julie respectively move lithely around the downstairs parlour - and in and out of one another’s grasp - and yet at the same time, their dynamic elasticity of gesture maintains the underlying dramatic tension which sees them taut as rubber bands at breaking point, snapping mercurially between malleability and manipulation, love and hate, desire and disgust.

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Between the two of them, both literally and structurally, is Megan Roberts’ finely tuned Christine, whose negotiation of humility and pride in her subservience is the perfectly pitched and quietly compelling counterpoise to Gaunt’s chillingly convincing moral disorientation. The three actors complement each other in series of triangulated gestures which symbolically express the emotional vectors by which they are connected: Johnston’s physical advances on both women convey his divided affections; Roberts’ wipes his face with the very same wet cloth Gaunt uses to douse the flames of moral iniquity from her reddened cheeks, and both undress ‘their’ footman, whose chest, bared by Christine, becomes a striking image reflective of the play’s interest in what we look like stripped of socially prescribed morality.

For all the production’s material adherence to the naturalism of the play, however, there are, at times, in Johnston and Gaunt’s rendition of Jean and Julie’s fatal clashes, moments where completely convincing control over the script’s notorious volatility seems to slip their grasp. But only just; slippage amounted to nothing more offensive than the occasionally hurried or snatched final line after long argumentation, a whiff of melodrama in the self-conscious theatricality of Jean’s fervent story-telling, or Gaunt’s sporadic overly screechy retort to Johnston’s verbal transgressions. Any criticism of apparently schizophrenic, point-blank transitions between polarised gesture and vocal tone, however, must be tempered by remembering that quicksilver volte-faces of sentiment and intention absolutely characterise these roles. Their mutability unlocks Strindberg’s symbolism, too, for confused and enraged by the bars of social rank, they become the caged birds Miss Julie’s green finch - beheaded live* by Jean - symbolises.

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A couple of sound niggles including a questionably long thunderstorm and unnecessarily painful opening violin solo are merely superficial and would be easily remediable by contraction, which would provide a simple antidote to their slight slowing of the production’s otherwise pacy pulse rate. For in all other respects there is very little that is superficial about this production. Performances are nuanced and consistently emotionally charged - in all emotional directions, and a palpably tense and textured audience connection is their reward. Roberts, Johnston and Gaunt’s performances together conspire to vivify Strindberg’s psychological freight-train of social insecurity, and their tactile interactions throughout contribute to its indomitable destructive passage through relationships within and without class boundaries. Verbosity and verbal vitriol is complemented by intelligent body language from all, and in particular by Gaunt’s sensitive musicality of tone as she pitches Miss Julie’s fall ‘down, down, down’. Her sigh at the sordid romance of a young shit-covered Jean’s adoration spoke volumes, and to an extent for the audience, as we observed, for a moment together, the banal irony of domestic tragedy.

*I’m sure no animals were actually harmed during the performance.